Kickass and Chicago Irish by Bill Stokes

Attribution: Natasha Jelezkina from Chicago, USA, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

By Bill Stokes

Kickass, the doorstop dog, reports that thanks to his father’s “Yankee” genetic handoff he can come up with identity to almost any given ethnicity even including Irish.

It was not enough, however, to keep him out of trouble with the Chicago Irish on the St. Pat’s Day when he wrote a Trib column complaining that people were tired of stumbling over drunken Irishmen on St. Pat’s Day and the Irish needed to shape up their behavior.

There was an immediate and sustained uproar from the Chicago Irish community with multiple suggestions as to various things that should happen to the keeper, the most genteel of which was that he should jump into the green-dyed Chicago River. A lead commentator on WBBM radio had other more ominous suggestions.

The experience left a mark, however, and lo these many years later the keeper wishes everyone—including his German wife Phyllis a happy St. Patrick’s Day, and in an aside to his Irish friends he wishes that more of them were still around to stumble over.